Vox

Leitura de 16 min

Designing Your Skill Portfolio

Summary

In this episode of Developer Tea, host Jonathan Contrell shifts from abstract career philosophy to a more concrete discussion about building a skill portfolio. He introduces the concept of treating skill development like an investment portfolio, emphasizing the importance of diversification across technical and non-technical areas to manage risk and ensure long-term career growth.

Contrell explains how the portfolio model applies to skills, suggesting developers should learn a mix of “safe” technologies (popular, well-supported) and more experimental ones. He draws parallels to stock portfolios, diets, and toolkits, highlighting that diversity protects against obsolescence and opens more opportunities. The episode includes a sponsor segment promoting the Red Hat Developer Program as a resource for skill development.

The host then moves beyond simple diversification to discuss how skills interact and combine. Using metaphors of magicians and musicians, he illustrates how base skills can be layered and integrated to create more powerful skill sets. The key insight is that developers should focus on how new skills can enhance existing ones and extract underlying principles that apply across domains.

Contrell emphasizes treating tactical skills as expressions of deeper principles. By identifying shared principles between different skills, developers can transfer knowledge more effectively and make their entire skill portfolio more valuable. The episode concludes with practical questions to ask when learning: how does this skill combine with my others, and what principles can I extract from it?

Recommendations

Tools

  • Red Hat Developer Program — Sponsored resource mentioned in the episode that provides access to app development products, tools, tutorials, and content for enterprise software development using microservices, containers, and cloud technologies.

Websites

  • developert.com — The podcast’s website where all episodes can be found, though currently redirecting to spec.fm with plans for a relaunch later in the year.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to skill portfolio thinking — Jonathan Contrell introduces the episode’s focus on moving from abstract career philosophy to concrete skill development. He explains that while he won’t prescribe specific skills, he will discuss how to think about what to include in your skill portfolio. The goal is to help developers find clarity and purpose through strategic skill building.
  • 00:02:15 — The portfolio model: diversification and risk — Contrell introduces the portfolio metaphor, comparing skill development to building a stock portfolio. He explains key portfolio concepts like consistent investment and diversification across industries and risk levels. This model helps manage risk—if one skill becomes obsolete, others remain valuable. He extends the metaphor to diets and toolkits to illustrate the value of variety.
  • 00:05:17 — Applying portfolio thinking to skills — The host applies portfolio principles directly to skill development. He suggests developers should diversify across technical and non-technical skills, and consider risk when choosing what to learn. ‘Safe’ choices include popular, well-supported technologies, while riskier skills might be newer or niche. The goal is to avoid putting all your effort into a single direction that might not pay off.
  • 00:07:59 — Beyond diversification: skill interaction — Contrell moves beyond simple diversification to discuss how skills interact and combine. Using magician and musician metaphors, he shows how base skills can be layered to create more complex abilities. The key insight is that skills shouldn’t be isolated—they should integrate with and enhance each other, creating compound value greater than the sum of individual skills.
  • 00:11:41 — Skills as expressions of principles — The most important segment: Contrell urges developers to treat skills as expressions of underlying principles. By extracting principles from new skills, you can apply them to other domains. This transforms learning from accumulating tactics to understanding transferable concepts. He provides questions to guide learning: how does this combine with existing skills, and what principles does it share with them?

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2021-01-11T15:00:48Z
  • Duration: 00:20:47

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] So much about what we talk about on the show is about philosophy and thinking

[00:00:08] from an abstract perspective about our careers, but in today’s episode I want to

[00:00:13] get a little bit more concrete and talk about building your skills portfolio. We

[00:00:18] are going to stay abstract in terms of not telling you exactly what to put in

[00:00:23] that skills portfolio, but instead how to think about what to put in that skills

[00:00:29] portfolio. My name is Jonathan Contrell. You’re listening to Developer T. My goal

[00:00:33] on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and

[00:00:36] purpose in their careers, and skills are a huge part of every developer’s career.

[00:00:44] And very often software engineers, especially brand new software engineers,

[00:00:51] people are just starting out, they get so much reward out of skill development.

[00:00:58] After all, it takes a baseline of skills to even start playing around with

[00:01:05] software engineering, and there’s a huge gap between what it means to be a

[00:01:11] software engineer and actually creating software. There’s so many more skills

[00:01:20] involved than just writing code, and those skills are a broad range of things

[00:01:28] that go well beyond just the technical obvious things that we all know about.

[00:01:34] And so it’s easy, once again, it’s easy to imagine that so much of our careers,

[00:01:42] nearly all of our careers, are about skill development, but the truth is that

[00:01:48] the skill development that we do pursue is as much about the combination of skills

[00:01:59] as it is about the individual skills themselves. So in today’s episode, I want

[00:02:04] to approach this from the angle of thinking about skills like a portfolio,

[00:02:10] but there’s a little more to it than that as well. So let’s start with thinking

[00:02:15] about portfolios. A good portfolio, and when we say portfolio, typically we’re

[00:02:20] talking about stocks, right? These are little slices of equity in a company for

[00:02:28] the simplest example of a stock. And so when you think about building a stock

[00:02:35] portfolio, some of the most obvious advice that you’ll hear is that you need

[00:02:39] to invest consistently, that you need to have diversity. In other words, you need

[00:02:46] to have investments in a wide range of things, a wide range of risk levels, and

[00:02:54] a wide range of industries. And the reason for this is because risk in one

[00:03:01] industry may not necessarily affect risk in another industry, and in fact

[00:03:06] you can kind of rely on the market to eventually even out and ultimately grow.

[00:03:12] That’s what it’s done for a long time, and this is why people diversify their

[00:03:16] portfolios and why wealth can continue to grow in a portfolio. So this

[00:03:23] is a good model. It’s a good mental model for a lot of other things in our

[00:03:28] lives. For example, how we spend our time, the kinds of decisions we make, even

[00:03:33] things like our diets. We can take the idea of diversification from, you know, a

[00:03:42] risk management perspective and apply it to our diets. We can diversify our diets,

[00:03:47] and that way if you have a little bit of something bad, you may even it out with a

[00:03:52] little bit of something good. Now this model makes a lot of sense for our

[00:03:57] skills as well. We can think about learning different types of skills

[00:04:04] across the technical spectrum and across the non-technical spectrum, and we can

[00:04:10] apply this thinking pretty thoroughly. We can think about, for example, learning a

[00:04:15] brand new language. Maybe this language is kind of risky in terms of, you know,

[00:04:21] sunk cost. It may be a little bit risky to learn this because maybe the language

[00:04:25] is gonna die in a couple of years, and all that time that we invested in it,

[00:04:31] maybe it won’t pan out to have been worth it. You can imagine this kind of

[00:04:35] thinking applying to skills in the same way that you might have a variety of

[00:04:43] tools, a tool belt, and if you have, you know, all common screwdrivers, you’re

[00:04:52] probably not going to be able to do a lot of different things. You may be able

[00:04:55] to do everything that everybody ever wanted to do with screwdrivers, but you

[00:05:00] may be limited with other other endeavors, right? So you would need a

[00:05:05] variety or diversity of tools. You might need a diversity of sizes. Even a

[00:05:10] diversity of quality in those tools could be helpful. So that’s the idea of

[00:05:17] building your skills portfolio. You should start out by understanding that you

[00:05:21] shouldn’t put everything in a single direction, and if you’re going to choose

[00:05:26] a single direction, it probably makes sense to choose a fairly kind of bland

[00:05:33] one, right? A direction that is relatively risk-averse, meaning a language that is

[00:05:40] well-supported, that’s fairly popular, a technology that has a lot of backing, a

[00:05:46] lot of, it’s been proven maybe by large companies, you know, has a lot of

[00:05:52] adoption. So this is one way to think about skill development, to think about

[00:05:59] risk and to think about building your portfolio of skills based on, you know,

[00:06:05] risk-reward continuum. But there’s a little bit more to the skill portfolio

[00:06:11] puzzle. We’re going to talk about that right after we talk about today’s

[00:06:15] sponsor, Red Hat. Red Hat is the first sponsor of Developer T for 2021. The Red

[00:06:22] Hat Developer Program brings developers together to learn from each other and

[00:06:25] create more extraordinary things faster. You can get free access to countless

[00:06:31] benefits to help you drive your career with Red Hat Developer. Access a full

[00:06:35] portfolio of app development products and tools for creating enterprise

[00:06:39] software, built on microservices, containers, and the cloud. Everything from

[00:06:44] downloads to developer how-to’s, getting started guides, videos, books,

[00:06:48] newsletters. There’s a lot of stuff in there. Access to the gated contents of

[00:06:52] the award-winning Red Hat customer portal. You can even access

[00:06:57] interactive tutorials on the latest technology and Red Hat products.

[00:07:01] Speaking of skill development, this is going to help you develop a variety of

[00:07:06] skills. Hopefully you can pick the right ones at the end of this episode. Head

[00:07:10] over to developers.redhat.com. That’s developers.redhat.com slash about. Thanks

[00:07:18] again to Red Hat for sponsoring today’s episode of Developer T. So skills can

[00:07:23] absolutely be kind of framed in the model of a portfolio. And when you think

[00:07:32] about a portfolio, you think about skills that match a portfolio concept. You try

[00:07:38] to diversify those skills. Make them as different as possible or make them as

[00:07:44] safe as possible. Whatever your particular risk preference is, these are

[00:07:48] all the terms you might use if you think about your about your skills as a

[00:07:53] portfolio. But there’s something different going on or something beyond a portfolio

[00:07:59] going on when we talk about skills. And that is that your skills interact with

[00:08:04] each other. And what do we mean by that? Well, imagine you have a magician. I know

[00:08:12] this is a strange metaphor, but go with me. A magician learns a very basic trick.

[00:08:18] And that basic trick might be, you know, how to find a card in a deck. But then

[00:08:24] they learn a totally different trick. Maybe they learn how to do a larger

[00:08:29] scale illusion, like catching a bullet in their teeth. But then they start

[00:08:36] learning tricks on top of these. For example, they might learn how to find

[00:08:43] your card in a deck with a blindfold on. And what’s interesting about these skills

[00:08:50] is that they combine with each other. So you’re essentially using kind of this

[00:08:55] base level skill and you’re adding a new one and then you’re using them

[00:08:59] together. And eventually you can find overlap between the bullet

[00:09:06] catching trick and the card finding trick. There is a way that somehow there

[00:09:13] would be a trick in that magician’s portfolio that uses some of those base

[00:09:16] level skills. Some, you know, the common skills to both of those base level

[00:09:22] ideas. Another great example of this is musicians. Musicians may learn scales.

[00:09:29] They may learn, you know, you might learn how to play a chord on a guitar. You

[00:09:34] might learn how to read music. You might learn how to improvise. You may learn how

[00:09:42] to play the same song but on multiple different instruments. You learn about

[00:09:46] rhythm. You learn about timing. You might learn about different styles or, you

[00:09:53] know, kind of tones that you can play with a given instrument. All of these

[00:09:57] things are distinct skills and yet they all combine. When you play a given song

[00:10:04] it’s very likely that all of those skills, all those individual skills, you’re

[00:10:09] not thinking about them as individual skills. You’re thinking about them as a

[00:10:13] cohesive set of skills, right? That’s why you would call it a skill set but the

[00:10:20] skills combine with each other. So the scales that you learn on guitar might

[00:10:25] combine with the work that you might do on piano and the timing that you do on

[00:10:30] piano might combine with the timing that you would use to play the drums and the

[00:10:36] style that you use to play the drums might combine or inform the way that you

[00:10:42] play guitar. So all of these things kind of mix together and when you think about

[00:10:48] these different skills combining together to form a skill set, this is what

[00:10:57] we really want to go after when we talk about a portfolio. You want to think

[00:11:02] about how these skills interact and most importantly, as you are learning the next

[00:11:09] thing, imagine how can I best combine this new skill with the things I already

[00:11:16] know? How can I integrate what I’m learning now backwards? What lessons

[00:11:24] can I learn from this new technical skill that I can apply or that I can

[00:11:29] update my previous knowledge so that I become better in all of the things that

[00:11:33] I’ve already invested in? And in this way we treat skills as expressions of

[00:11:41] principles. I want you to focus in on this. This is the most important part of

[00:11:47] this episode and I want you to take away. Treat your skills, the tactical things

[00:11:53] that you learn, as expressions or the outcomes, the kind of minutiae that is

[00:12:02] the result of practicing principles. And the reason you want to do this is

[00:12:08] because now you can start to say, okay well I’ve learned this thing in this

[00:12:12] arena, how does it apply elsewhere and what is the shared underlying principle?

[00:12:18] Why does it apply in two places? The principle that allows you to find a card

[00:12:25] and a deck is the same or it may share some same underlying principles that

[00:12:32] allows you to trick people into believing that you’ve caught a bullet

[00:12:34] in your teeth. And it’s not because they’re the same trick, it’s because they

[00:12:40] both rely on some similar principles like, for example, taking advantage of

[00:12:45] people’s attention and the way that their attention can easily be diverted.

[00:12:50] And so when you’re thinking about your skill portfolio, I want you to both

[00:12:56] imagine how does this skill combine with my other skills? And how can I integrate

[00:13:02] this backwards? How can it make my existing skills more valuable? And then

[00:13:08] think at one layer deeper. Why does this skill share something in common with

[00:13:16] another one? What are these shared principles or what principles can I

[00:13:20] extract from these new skills that I’m learning? Thanks so much for listening

[00:13:25] to today’s episode of Developer T. Thank you again to today’s sponsor, Red Hat.

[00:13:29] Head over to developers.redhat.com slash about to get more information about the

[00:13:36] Red Hat Developer Program. This episode and every other episode of Developer T

[00:13:40] can be found if you head over to developert.com. Currently that’s going to

[00:13:44] redirect you to the spec website, but at some point this year we are going to

[00:13:48] relaunch the developert.com website. It will be brand new. We’re really excited about

[00:13:54] that. It hasn’t happened yet, so stay tuned for that. But you can always use

[00:13:59] developert.com to find this show. You can also find the show on any podcast app

[00:14:03] that you’re currently using if you want to help the show out. There’s one really

[00:14:08] important way that you can do that, right? The critical, critical thing that you can

[00:14:12] do to help us continue making Developer T. into the future is to leave a review

[00:14:16] on iTunes. Not only does this help me out because I get to see what you’re

[00:14:21] thinking about the show. You see how it’s helping you. I can learn, you know, what

[00:14:26] can we focus more on? What can we focus less on? This is really the the channel

[00:14:30] for feedback, but it also helps other developers find the show and decide if

[00:14:35] they want to spend their time listening to it. We’re well over 900 episodes. It

[00:14:38] can be a little bit intimidating to find a podcast that has that much content,

[00:14:44] and it might feel like a big commitment. So your review is going to help another

[00:14:49] person understand why the show is worth their time. Now here’s the thing. If this

[00:14:56] show is not worth reviewing to you, I want you to ask this question. Is this

[00:15:01] show worth your time? If it is, then I hope that it’s also worth the time it

[00:15:07] takes to leave a review. Thanks so much for listening to this episode, and until

[00:15:11] next time, enjoy your tea.

[00:15:37] you

[00:16:07] you

[00:16:37] you

[00:17:07] you

[00:17:37] you

[00:18:07] you

[00:18:37] you

[00:19:07] you

[00:19:37] you

[00:20:07] you

[00:20:37] you

Visão de gráfico